Katherine Mooney at the 2020 Williams Research Center Symposium, Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, January 18, 2020.

Horse racing was the first mass-audience sport in the United States, and New Orleans was the home of the highest-class racing in the nation in the pre-Civil War period. The enslaved men who rode and trained at the city's tracks were the first black sports celebrities. The history of racing in New Orleans is also the history of how those men and their descendants made the transition from slavery to freedom and how they sought to gain equality along with that freedom. Jim Crow nearly erased their centuries of accomplishment, but they persevered. New Orleans tracks have fostered some of the most prominent African American horsemen.